The problem with the hypothesis that birds
evolved from dinosaurs is so pervasive that we asked permission
of Answers in Genesis,
and the publisher, Master
Books, Inc., to publish an entire chapter from this book on
our web site to refute it. This chapter contains the most
up-to-date arguments against this hypothesis. Please take the
time to read it in its entirety. Better yet, purchase a copy of
the book and see all the additional compelling evidence it
provides against evolution. We are profoundly grateful to Answers
in Genesis and Master Books, Inc., for allowing us to publish
this on our web site.

Birds are animals with unique features like
feathers and special lungs, and most are well designed for
flight. Evolutionists believe they evolved from reptiles, maybe
even a type of dinosaur. Teaching
about Evolution and the Nature of Science
even presents an alleged dinosaur-bird intermediate as evidence
for evolution. This intermediate and other arguments for bird
evolution we critically examined in this chapter. This chapter
also provides detailed information on some of the unique features
of birds.

ARCHAEOPTERYX

Teaching about Evolution has several
imaginary "dialogues" between teachers. In one of them
(p.8), there is the following exchange:

Karen: A student in one of my classes
at the university told me that there are big gaps in the fossil
record. Do you know anything about that?Doug: Well, there's Archaeopteryx. It's a fossil
that has feathers like a bird but the skeleton of a small
dinosaur. It's one of those missing links thats not missing
any more.

0n the same page, there is a picture of a
fossil of Archaeopteryx, stating:

A bird that lived 150 million years ago and
had many reptilian characteristics, was discovered in 1861 and
helped support the hypothesis of evolution proposed by Charles
Darwin in The Origin of Species, two years earlier.

However, Alan
Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist himself, disagrees
with assertions like those of "Doug:"

Paleontologists have tried to turn
Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's
not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of
"paleobabble" is going to change that. (1)

A legitimate artist's reconstruction
of Archaeopteryx, consistent with its
known bird features (2).

Archaeopteryx had fully formed flying
feathers (including asymmetric vanes and ventral, reinforcing
furrows as in modern flying birds), the classical elliptical
wings of modem woodland birds, and a large wishbone for
attachment of muscles responsible for the downstroke of the
wings.(3) Its brain was essentially that of a flying bird, with a
large cerebellum and visual cortex. The fact that it had teeth is
irrelevant to its alleged transitional status - a number of
extinct birds had teeth, while many reptiles do not. Furthermore,
like other birds, both its maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible
(lower jaw) moved. In most vertebrates, including reptiles, only
the mandible moves.(4)

FEATHERED DINOSAURS?

In the last few years, the media have run
headlines about alleged "feathered dinosaurs" proving
that dinosaurs evolved into birds. These alleged ancestors are
types of theropods, the group of carnivorous dinosaurs that
includes Tyrannosaurus rex.

We should remember that the media often
sensationalize "proofs" of evolution, but the later
disproofs, even by other evolutionists, hardly rate a mention.
For example, in 1996 there were headlines like "Feathered
Fossil proves Some Dinosaurs Evolved into Birds."'(5) This was about a fossil called Sinosauropteryx
prima. (6) Creationist publications
advised readers to be skeptical and keep an open mind. (7) They were vindicated when four leading paleontologists,
including Yale Universitys John Ostrom, later found that
the "feathers" were just a parallel array of fibers, (8) probably collagen.

Another famous alleged dino-bird link was Mononykus.
claimed to be a "flightless bird." (9) The cover of Time magazine even illustrated it with
feathers, although not the slightest trace of feathers had been
found. (10) Later evidence indicated that "Mononykus
was clearly not a bird ... it clearly was a fleet-footed
fossorial [digging] theropod." (11)

Many news agencies have reported (June 1998) on
two fossils found in Northern China that are claimed to be
feathered theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs). The fossils, Protarchaeopteryx
robusta and Caudipteryxzoui, are claimed to be
"the immediate ancestors of the first birds." (12)

The two latest discoveries are
"dated" at 120 to 136 million years while Archaeopteryx,
a true bird, is "dated" at 140 to 150 million years,
making these "bird ancestors" far younger than their
descendants!

Feduccia is not convinced, and neither is his
colleague, University of Kansas paleontologist Larry Martin.
Martin says: "You have to put this into perspective. To the
People who wrote the paper, the chicken world be a fathered
dinosaur." (13) Feduccia and Martin
believe that Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx are more likely to
be flightless birds similar to ostriches. They have, birdlike
teeth and lack the long tail seen in theropods. Caudipteryx
even used gizzard stones like modern plant-eating birds, but
unlike theropods. (14)

There are many problems with the dinosaur-to-bird dogma.
Feduccia points out:

"It's biophysically impossible to evolve
flight from such large bipeds with foreshortened forelimbs and
heavy, balancing tails," exactly the wrong anatomy for
flight. (15)

There is also very strong evidence from the
forelimb structures that dinosaurs could not have been the
ancestors of birds. A team led by Feduccia studied bird embryos
under a microscope, and published their study in the journal Science."
(16) Their findings were reported as follows:

New research shows that birds lack the
embryonic thumb that dinosaurs had, suggesting that it is
"almost impossible" for the species to be closely
related." (17)

DID GLIDERS TURN INTO FLIERS?

Feduccia and Martin reject the idea that birds
evolved from dinosaurs, with good reason. But they are unwilling
to abandon evolution, so instead they believe that birds evolved
from reptiles called crocodilomorphs. They propose these
small, crocodile-like reptiles lived in trees, and
"initially leapt, then glided from perch to perch." (18)

But a gliding stage is not intermediate
between a land animal and a flier. Gliders either have even
longer wings than fliers (compare a glider's wingspan with an
airplane's, or the wingspan of birds like the albatross which
spend much time gliding), or have a wide membrane which is quite
different from a wing (note the shape of a hang-glider or a
flying squirrel). Flapping flight also requires highly controlled
muscle movements to achieve flight, which in turn requires that
the brain has the program for these movements. Ultimately, this
requires new, generic information that a non-flying creature
lacks. Another problem is:

Neither their hypothetical ancestor nor
transitional forms linking it to known fossil birds have been
found. And although they rightly argue that cladistic analyses
[comparisons of shared characteristics] are only as good as the
data upon which they are based, no cladistic study has yet
suggested a non-theropod ancestor. (19)

In short, Feduccia and Martin provide
devastating criticism against the idea that birds evolved
"ground up" from running dinosaurs (the cursorial
theory). But the dino-to-bird advocates counter with equally
powerful arguments against Feduccia and Martin's
"trees-down" (arboreal) theory. The evidence
indicates that the critics are both right - birds did not evolve
either from running dinos or from tree-living mini-crocodiles. In
fact, birds did not evolve from non-birds at all! This is
consistent with the biblical account that distinct kinds of birds
were created on Day 5 (Gen. 1:20-23).

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REPTILES AND
BIRDS

All evolutionists believe that birds evolved
from some sort of reptile, even if they can't agree on the kind.
However, reptiles and birds are very different in many ways.
Flying birds have streamlined bodies, with the weight centralized
for balance in flight; hollow bones for lightness which are also
part of their breathing system; powerful muscles for flight, with
specially designed long tendons that run over pulley-like
openings in the shoulder bones; and very sharp vision. And birds
have two of the most brilliantly designed structures in ,nature -
their feathers and special lungs.

FEATHERS

Feduccia says
"Feathers are a near-prefect
adaptation for flight" because they are
lightweight, strong, aerodynamically shaped,
and have an in intricate structure of barbs and
hooks. This structure makes them waterproof.
and a quick preen with the bill will cause
flattened feather to snap into fully aerodynamic
shape again. (20)

Examine the
amazing close-up (left) of the
barbules of a feather showing the tiny booklets
and grooves (magnified 20,000 times). (21)

The atheistic evolutionist Richard Dawkins, in
book highly recommended by Teaching
about Evolution and the Nature of Science,
glibly states: "Feathers are modified reptilian scales,"'
(22) a widely held view among evolutionists. But scales are
folds in skin; feathers are complex structures with barb,
barbules, and hooks. They also originate in a totally different
way, from follicles inside the skin in a manner akin to hair.

In chapter 2 we showed that every structure or
organ must be represented by information at the genetic
level, written in a chemical alphabet on the long molecule DNA.
Clearly, the information required to code for the construction of
a feather is of a substantially different order from that
required for a scale. For scales to have evolved into feathers
means that a significant amount of genetic information had to
arise in the bird's DNA which was not present in that of its
alleged reptile ancestor.

As usual, natural selection would not favor the
hypothetical intermediate forms. Many evolutionists claim that
dinosaurs developed feathers for insulation and later evolved and
refiner them for flight purposes. But like all such
"just-so" stories this fails to explain how
the new generic information arose so it cold be selected for.

Anther problem is that selection for heat
insulation is quite different from selection for flight.
On birds that have lost the ability to fly, the feathers have
also lost much of their structure and become hair-like. On
flightless birds, mutations degenerating the aerodynamic feather
structure would not be as much a handicap as they would be on a
flying bird. Therefore, natural selection would not eliminate
them, and might even select for such degeneration. As
usual, loss of flight and feather structure are losses of
information, so are irrelevant to evolution, which requires
an increase of information. All that matters it that the
feathers provide insulation, and hair-like structures are fine -
they work for mammals. (23) That is, natural
selection would work against the development of a flight
feather if the feathers were needed for insulation. And hairy
feathers are adequate.

Downy feathers are also good insulators and are
common on flightless birds. Their fluffiness is because they lack
the hooks of flight feathers. Again, natural selection would
work to prevent evolution of aerodynamic feathers from
heat insulators.

Finally, feather proteins (F-keratins) are
biochemically different from skin and scale proteins (a-keratins), as
well. One researcher concluded:

At the morphological level feathers are
traditionally considered homologous with reptilian scales.
However, in development, morphogenesis [shape/form generation],
gene structure, protein shape and sequence, and filament
formation and structure, feathers are different. (24)

THE AVIAN LUNG

Drastic changes are needed to turn a reptile
lung into a bird lung. In reptile lungs, the air is drawn into
tiny sacs (alveoli, singular alveolus) where
blood extracts the oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. the stale
air is then breathed out the same way it came in. But birds have
a complicated system of air sacs, even involving the hollow
bones. this system keeps air flowing in one direction through
special tubes (parabronchi, singular parabronchus)
in the lung, and blood moves through the lung's blood vessels in
the opposite direction for efficient oxygen uptake, (25) an excellent engineering design. (26)

How would the "bellows"-style lungs
of reptiles evolve gradually into avian lungs? The hypothetical
intermediate stages could not conceivably function properly,
meaning the poor animal would be unable to breathe. So natural
selection would work to preserve the existing arrangement, by
eliminating any misfit intermediates.

Also, even assuming that we could construct a
theoretical series of functional intermediate stages, would
natural selection "drive" the changes? Probably not -
bats manage perfectly well, with bellows-style lungs - some cm
even hunt at an altitude of over two miles (three km). The avian
lung, with its super-efficiency, becomes especially advantageous
only at very high altitudes with low oxygen levels. There would
thus have been no selective advantage in replacing the reptilian
lung. (27)

We should probably not be surprised that Alan Feduccia's major
work on bird evolution doesn't even touch this problem. (28)

Some recent researchers of Sinosauropteryx's lung
structure showed that "its bellows-like lungs could not have
evolved into high performance lungs of modern birds." (29)

Interestingly, some defenders of dinosaur-to-bird evolution
discount this evidence against their theory by saying, "The
proponents of this argument offer no animal whose lungs could
have given rise to those in birds, which are extremely complex
and are unlike the lungs of any living animal. (30) Of course, only
evolutionary faith requires that bird lungs arose form lungs of
another animal.

Footnotes:

1.

Cited in V. Morell, "Archaeopteryx:
Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms," Science, 259(5096):764-65, February 5, 1993

D.P. Prothero and R.M. Schoch, editors, Major
Features of Vertebrate
Evolution, "on the Origin of Birds and of Avian
Flight," by J.H. Ostrom
(Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p.
160-177